SIMULTANEOUSLY ‘QUALITY’ AND ‘POPULAR’?: LAYERED POLYSEMY AND NOSTALGIC DISCOURSES IN DOCTOR WHO (BBC 2005- ) ROSS P. GARNER DEPARTMENT OF JOURNALISM, MEDIA AND CULTURAL STUDIES CARDIFF UNIVERSITY
‘QUALITY POPULAR’ TELEVISION AND STRUCTURED POLYSEMY • Nelson (2007: 174- 9) on ‘quality popular’ television drama: • Drawn from industrial discourses circulating in British television – ITV. • Extends to include ‘mainstream’ broadcasters – e.g. BBC One. • ‘Quality’ signifiers: • Production values. • Generic hybridity. • Construction of author-function. • ‘Popular’ signifiers: • “the relative predictability of TV genres” (175) • Structured polysemy - “all meanings do not exist ‘equally’ in the message: it has been structured in dominance, despite the impossibility of a ‘total closure’ of meaning …the ‘preferred reading’ is itself part of the message, can be identified withi n its linguistic and communicative structure.” (Morley 1995: 301)
‘QUALITY POPULAR’: INHERENTLY CONTRADICTORY? • Case study: Jenny’s death scene from ‘The Doctor’s Daughter’ (2008). • RTD era Who and discourses of nostalgia: • Post-2005 Doctor Who is “about time travel imprinted by loss” (Hills 2010a: 210) • Burling (2006: 8) – the “temporal contrast” time travel narrative. • ‘Personal nostalgia’ – arises from the combination of ‘time travel’ and ‘soap drama’ (Creeber 2004) elements (see also Hills 2010b).
‘QUALITY POPULAR’: INHERENTLY CONTRADICTORY?
‘QUALITY POPULAR’: INHERENTLY CONTRADICTORY? ‘Popular’ Conventions ‘Quality’ Conventions • • Accentuation and foregrounding of emotional Smith (2006: 89) – “good television distinguishes content. itself not by rejecting the practices of ordinary television but by using elegantly efficient • Deployment of ‘soap opera’ aesthetics – e.g. instances of standard techniques.” movement to the close-up. • Pearson (1992: 55) – “verisimilar codes” • Melodramatic performance codes. • Music – Murray Gold’s ‘Gallifrey’ theme: • “blaring music” (Feuer 1995: 116). • “a sense of stylistic integrity, in which themes and style are intertwined in an expressive and impressive way” (Cardwell 2007: 26).
DISCUSSION • Singular ‘quality popular’ reading position unattainable. • ‘Layered polysemy’: • Arises from necessities of the production context. • Offering incongruous, yet co-existing, preferred reading positions. • Agreeing with Morley (1995) – need to retain textualist focus. • Layered polysemy sits alongside, but differs from, existing TV Studies positions: • Ross (2008: 20-6) – ‘aesthetics of multiplicity’. • Johnson (2012: 160-5) – branding and paratextuality. • Post- structuralist avoidances of ‘the text’ as producer of meaning – e.g. McKee (2003), Sandvoss (2005).
CONTACT DETAILS • Email: GarnerRP1@Cardiff.ac.uk • Twitter: @DefConG • JOMEC Blog: http://www.jomec.co.uk/blog/
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